writing

Episode 3 The Reluctant Pilgrim

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Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1847), photograph by Samuel Vale, Executive Producer and Director of Photography

The ice on the path snapped, crackled and splintered underneath the soles of their walking boots. The ground was frozen solid. She felt as though she were walking with two blocks of ice strapped to her feet. She could feel the ground in her knees. The sound of her boots walking on frozen ground was like the crunching of bones. The chill of the wind sweeping across the moors caused her teeth to chatter in her head like a pair of castanets. Emily writes, she writes: “I lingered under that benign sky watched the moths fluttering among the heather and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass”. I remembered there is a spot mid barren hills where winter howls still, bringing a chill to the marrow.

By this time her toes were numb and every step was agony, her boots were rather too small, she made a reluctant pilgrim. She had lost track of time by stopping to take photographs on the way but photographs of what exactly? A seemingly vast, empty and undifferentiated landscape that she experienced as a rupture or a disjunction. The landscape was not easy to assimilate. it remained resolute and other. She was in the middle of it but couldn’t get into it, so she remained steadfastly on it for the duration of the walk. Time and space expanded in multiple directions on the Moors like the ripples on a pond. Three hours of walking felt like three years of living. The closer they got to Top Withens the further away it seemed to. Be. For an age it remained a tiny speck on the horizon.

He disappeared over a mound and briefly she found herself alone with naught but a wuthering wind whistling around her eardrums and flapping against her face. How exactly was she to report any of this back to George? She was famished.

On the 18th of May 1893, Top Withens was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Holes were made in the wall, the roof was partially torn off, flags were cracked, and around 30 windows were almost completely removed. A portion of slate was thrown far from the house by the wind, and in the kitchen the blade of a knife had been fused by the heat.

Thesis Preface: Mnemonic Residues-The Curated Ruin as Fictional Trace

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Fig. 1: Film Still, Letters to the Landscape, 2025, Episode 1 Epistles, Branwell Brontë’s Desk, Installation by Simon Armitage, Brontë Parsonage Museum

Fig.1 depicts Branwell Brontë’s desk at the Parsonage, part of Simon Armitage’s installation.

The desk is presented not merely as an archival object, but as a curated scene.

While Emily Brontë’s writing desk inspired this project, its modest size and protective casing rendered it visually elusive. In contrast, Branwell’s desk is prominent, cluttered, tactile, and performative. It transforms the archive into an encounter, where memory is actively constructed rather than simply preserved.

However, this is not strictly Branwell’s desk. It serves as a symbolic object, representing both a failed legacy and a speculative presence. The surrounding items are deliberately arranged, their authenticity uncertain. What matters is not whether they are real, but what they perform: a residue of ambition, a trace of authorship unmade.

The desk functions as a surrogate archive, a site where silence is staged, absence made visible. It embodies not Branwell himself, but the concept of Branwell, a mnemonic placeholder in literary history.

My entire PhD could be characterised as an attempt to crack open this image—to deconstruct its rhetoric of display, interrogate the politics of preservation, the aesthetics of collecting, and the archive’s desire to hold what cannot be kept, to capture what cannot be retained.

This is where the work begins…

Let us go you and I, let us begin by walking, together, into the landscape.

The wind on the moor carries more than weather, it carries memory, sediment, and the ghostly residue of letters never sent…

Fig.2 Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (1847), photograph by Samuel Vale

Dispatches 03/02/2024: Today, there is a 65% chance of precipitation. The temperature is 5 degrees, but it feels like 2. The wind direction is South, at a speed of 9 miles per hour. Humidity is at 73% and visibility is very good. The sun rose at 7.39 am and set at 4 pm.

This is how the day began, A weather report. A mood. A trace.

It’s not just data, it’s atmosphere. It sets the tone for a fieldwork that is not simply visual but experiential, even visceral. Not evidentiary, but affective.

In Letters to the Landscape (2025), I return to Brontë Country not to recover a lost past, but to trace the gesture of its dispersal.

This thesis begins with a walk: a slow, deliberate movement through terrain marked by literary inheritance and vernacular forgetting. The film, composed of fragments, postcards, voiceovers, and archival stills, does not seek to reconstruct history, but to perform its dislocation. Through a speculative feminist lens, I engage with the archive not as a repository, but as a site of haunting and (re)collection. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of spectrality (1994) and Schneider’s theory of the explicit body (1997), I ask: What remains when the archive is touched, not read? What kinds of knowledge emerge when history is felt rather than narrated? What happens when the archive is performed rather than preserved?    

These provocations set the stage for a research journey that is as much about unearthing as about unsettling, as much about absence as about presence.

These fragments, objects, weather, walk, and archive embody the approach this thesis will take, moving between the material and the imagined, the evidentiary and the affective, the archive and the field, they set the mood and method for what follows. In what remains of this introduction, I move from the poetics of encounter to the conceptual and methodological frameworks that underpin this research.

From here, I turn to map the conceptual terrain, outlining the research questions, and situating my practice within the intersecting traditions of chorography, speculative feminist historiography, and creative fieldwork. The following section introduces the research context and background, main aims, themes, and structure of the thesis, and describes how the performative and speculative methods evoked here will be developed throughout its sections and into Brontë Country and beyond.

This is also where the work begins…

The Annotated Wuthering Heights

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Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and the wild Yorkshire moors that the characters inhabit. “I am Heathcliff”, Catherine declares. In her introduction Janet Gezari examines Catherine’s assertion and in her notes maps it to questions that flicker like stars in the novel s dark dreamscape. How do we determine who and what we are? What do the people closest to us contribute to our sense of identity? The Annotated Wuthering Heights provides those encountering the novel for the first time as well as those returning to it with a wide array of contexts in which to read Brontë’s romantic masterpiece. Gezari explores the philosophical, historical, economic, political, and religious contexts of the novel and its connections with Brontë’s other writing, particularly her poems. The annotations unpack Brontës allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and her other reading; elucidate her references to topics including folklore, educational theory, and slavery; translate the thick Yorkshire dialect of Joseph, the surly, bigoted manservant at the Heights; and help with other difficult or unfamiliar words and phrases. Handsomely illustrated with many color images that vividly recreate both Brontë’s world and the earlier Yorkshire setting of her novel, this newly edited and annotated text will delight and instruct the scholar and general reader alike.

Image and text reproduced from Amazon (accessed 18/12/25)

About Letters to the Landscape (2025)

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Title still

Letters to the Landscape brings together haunting, de-archiving, and displacement as interwoven strategies of resistance, contributing to ongoing conversations around feminist historiography, embodied research, and the politics of cultural memory. This work is a cinematic essay, practice-led investigation and situated methodology grounded in the archival practice of (re)collecting, framing vernacular archives as dynamic social agents and sites of affective transmission. Structured as episodic meditations across the moorlands of Brontë Country, the work interrogates how landscape, literature, and the female body intersect through archival gestures including letter writing, re-citing, reciting, remembering, walking, appropriation, and fictionalisation. Drawing on the epistolary form, found materials, and multimodal image-making the artist-researcher is positioned within both the physical terrain and the symbolic archive, enacting an embodied traversal that resists institutional fixity and foregrounds fragment, rupture, and affective resonance (Taylor, 2003; Schneider, 2011; Kämpfe, 2023). The project performs a recuperative act, (re)collecting postcards, letters, voices, and family photographs whilst acknowledging the impossibility of full recovery. Echoing Derrida’s (1996) notion of the archive as search and longing, the archive is conceived not as a fixed repository but as a haunted porous space: a séance, where Brontë, Gaskell, and the artist’s voice (in the guise of fictional personae Phyllis Dare) converge, interrupt, and overwrite each other. This polyphonic layering becomes a strategy of de-archiving, resisting singular authorship and re-situating memory as a shared unstable terrain.

Displacement emerges as both theme and method. The journey to Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (1847), is framed as reluctant encounter rather than literary pilgrimage, with the landscape enacting estrangement and resistance (Rosenberg, 2007; Sebald, 2013). Archival materials are (re)collected, redistributed, and misremembered, the gesture of collecting is transformed into a metaphor for unrequited desire. In this way, the archive migrates across bodies, media, and temporalities, a travelling entity whose meaning remains unstable and contested (Bal, 2002, Slaymaker, 2023; Carter et al., 2022). By foregrounding social performances of memory through walking, writing, (re)collecting, remembering, this project proposes a methodology of situated resistance: a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. Letters to the Landscape challenges dominant memorial frameworks by expanding how vernacular memory objects are read and activated across non-institutional sites. The project ultimately unfolds as a speculative feminist historiography re-situating memory as a living and embodied terrain. The work has been constructed through the interaction of several pseudonyms, operating under the fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette. By foregrounding these dramatis personae, the project interrogates authorship, authenticity, and the performance of identity within a speculative narrative framework. The use of performance, voice, and multi-modal forms foregrounds how vernacular archives carry social memory in ways that challenge existing interpretative structures, resisting containment through affective rupture. The work ultimately unfolds not to restore a lost narrative or reconstruct a singular past, but to re-situate memory within a living and embodied terrain where archival gestures become vehicles of resistance, resonance, and reimagination and landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.